USA

gunder2@tcnj.edu

Planting Ground

Planting flowers with my mother,
I knew this would be the last spring we did this together,
my father's voice growing louder each year.
We each playing our part in the silent dance,
each holding a stake on one end of a piece of yellow twine
stretching it across to make a thin shivering shadow on the planting ground.
My mother making the clean dark furrow
as I followed her with fistfuls of fertilizer 
and she came to follow me with the rusted hoe.
We would start at either end rattling seeds from the bright paper packets
until we met in the middle,
then shuffling a careful foot over foot crawl
each step pushing down the earth that sank beneath me warm and moist
moving apart and together in straight brown lines,
and beginning the next row
of bachelor's buttons and dahlias, larkspurs, starflowers
and nastursums because you could eat the yellow and orange flowers.
Seeds of cosmos dripped from my mother's slim brown fingers
into the open mouthed earth
until we had finished and she stood back,
blessing the new life with her half crooked smile.

Water Snakes

A long scar inches slowly down
my mother's belly,
an uncoiled snake sunning iself
in the August heat.

Its mate creeps slowly across my shoulder blade
curving curiously beneath my left breast.
The twin long puckered imperfections
from a time long since remembered
but never forgotten

when gloved hands lifted
my body from hers, open and bleeding.
I not birthed or born, but stolen,
when masked faces searched 
the skin above my broken toy heart.

We lie by the water together
I on my stomach
and she on her back
as if for a moment
stitched together again.

--for Sean Clancy

Dinner Guests

After the bourbon, Jimmy and my father 
traded tales of boyhood destruction,
how my father and Lenny Smith conspired 
to throw a cherry bomb into the 9th grade study hall
and how Jimmy in his five-year-old glory 
aimed wooden clothespin rockets 
at the bright Christmas tree bulbs
and launched them with rubberbands
on the living room floor of Patsy 
(short for Pasqual, little girls would never do these things)
Scarpeggio, his partner in crime.
They told of hanging garbage bags 
filled with an afternoon's worth of fishing
in tree branches by the school
for the satisfying stink of revenge,
the smell of smoke from stolen cigarettes 
behind neighbor's sheds, the sharp crack 
of beebee bullets through stained glass windows, 
and the shame of being picked up by the collar 
and dragged down the street to certain doom.

Then they talked more of the old days,
Jimmy proudly bringing his Barretta over 
and under shotgun to the table
while his wife Crystal chided him for bringing 
death so close to the dinner dishes
when the young vegan was there.
I just smiled and looked 
at the spiral cut pear glazed ham.
Jimmy only used the gun for 
skeet shooting and hunting quail now.
He had given up deer, as had my father 
when his daughters were born.
I thought of my metaphysical arguments
but father's head was filled with
the memories of dry leaves, 
thermoses of soup filled by a young wife,
and the thrill of firing his own gun.
My mother smiled at me, 
remembering when her blood, too 
was so warm.

After supper I helped Crystal with the dishes,
her weekly treatments and the preparation 
of dinner for seven had made her weaker. 
So she didn't put up much of a fight 
when I plunged my hands into the soapy water 
and began handing her clean plates.
We talked of skipping classes
and men and boys and poetry
and how the waitressing tips were bigger 
if you put up with the hands and mouths
of the drunken husbands and hunters at strip clubs.
Surprised to find an ally in a different generation,
I told Crystal about my sister's disdain 
and the strength of her newfound
religion that shook its head at that kind of job
and how she told me that bisexuals are just confused
and I looked into my little sister's pretty blue eyes
with just a bit more green in them that mine, 
and told her that I was just me
and not confused at all.

Sweet Ann's Mother

Ann's mother told us
about the banded pigeon
that she fed everyday
at the doorstep
while grandmother had a stroke
and when grandmother passed over
the pigeon disappeared.
She thought the cats must 
have finally got it.
They always looked at 
the slow bird with sweet
full honeyed eyes.

Ann's mother had 
driven from job to job
back and forth over
the Mason Dixon Line
in a beat up blue car
in the 60's after nursing school.
Ann's mother had
expressed such reservations about
letting her daughter drive an hour
north to Hackettstown
on the winter roads
with me for a party.

Ann's mother,
who I gave a loaf of
zucchini nut bread,
while she poured tea and smiled
and questioned the silver
ring in my lip,
never really knew Ann
and never knew our secret 
life of darkness 
and sweet tastes
in a freshly made bed 
of soft country sheets.

Sweet Ann who
was so different at night
in her mother's home 
after stealing glasses 
blushing with chablis, 
our drunken laughter echoing 
in the darkness of her backyard,
I swung on the old rope swing
where her great aunt and uncle 
had gently swung their ancient bones
my feet almost touching 
the frozen December branches.

© All Copyright, Marcy Gunder.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.